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Saturday, June 27, 2009

Worst PCI installation ever...

As my computer is a little low on USB ports, 4 on the back filled with mouse, keyboard, graphic tablet and monitor, leaving no place for an USB HD and printer, I decided to install a USB PCI card. Shouldn't be so hard, after all I have done that a few times before. What I didn't expect was how totally broken the design of my PC case is.

Normally you would expect the screws to be on the inside of the case, but not here, the screws for the PCI card are on the outside. This means you have to wrestle the top of the blind through a quite small opening, but that of course isn't enough, as you try to wrestle the thing through the opening, the bottom of the PCI card collides with the actual PCI port. There is also a corner on top of the whole mess which you have to navigate around and even when you are close to being done, you still have to perfectly hit a thing at the bottom of the PCI blind. And of course all that happens with one of those tiny half-height cards that don't give you any surface to properly grap them, right next to a huge PCI card which doesn't give much free room for your hands on top of that. Capacitors right next to the PCI slot add some additional challange on top, as you constantly end up hitting them with your PCI blind.

Even after I finally managed to wreste the card into the slot somehow, I can't say I understand how that piece of crap case is meant to function. It seems to require a ton of luck to hit that one tiny position and rotation angle that allows you to fit in the PCI blind without hitting the PCI port, which is next to impossible.